I think it’s fair to say, we’ve finally managed to build a tech /web / creative community in and around Bournemouth, wooohooo!

Meetdraw

Coming in June Meetdraw X (10) – wow! From its humble beginnings in iBar to the 100+ regular attended quarterly events for all digital / creative animals.

Bar Camp Bournemouth
(Website not updated since #bcbomo3 though…)

3 successful bar camps done… attracting around 100 developers / coders and hackers to the (sunny) south coast for 2 days of self organising talks.

Ignite Bomo

In September there will be an ignite event as part of the Bournemouth business week aka Business on the Beach 2011. 5 min talks on tech / trend and cool things.

Bournemouth Creatives (formerly Bomo Creatives)

This networking / creative lobby type group has recently launched their micro-fund for local arts projects. Brilliant!

Dorset Digital

Pre-dating meetdraw, this tech get together at local pubs has restarted for 2011 (meeting 18th May in Dorchester)

Aside from these events, how about shared working spaces?

Yeah, we got those too:

Enterprise Pavilion

For startup creative businesses, based at the Arts University College Bournemouth.

Digital Workspaces

Based in the center of Bournemouth on Richmond hill, with a combination of hotdesk space and startup office space it’s fostered 2 new collaborative ventures I know of this year. (Plus we’re based there so it must be good… if you’d like to visit there’s an open evening on 27th May at 7pm too)

Anything I missed, leave me a comment? (I bet I have…)

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On a train journey yesterday I was reading the latest Wired magazine which has a very good set of articles/interviews on the culture of failure #1 (especially the difference between the US and EU attitudes to) and it got me thinking…

• In the same way that some banks were “too large to fail”, do we now have a set of tech companies too large too fail?

Let’s imagine all the lawsuit insanity around at the moment resulted in Google (I choose them merely as an example #2) owing more money than they could afford to pay (I know this is unlikely!), forcing them into bankruptcy/closure…

• Would they be allowed to fail?

Taking another example, the US government asked Twitter to postpone maintenance when #iran was going on; Imagine if they were declaring bankruptcy instead.

What about some of the other lesser known companies we rely on for internet architecture?

Whilst I’d feel fairly secure that our worldwide information superhighway could withstand the collapse of one or two tech giants, there are undoubtedly parallels with the way banks form a financial global infrastructure that we rely upon.

• Could we imagine a bail-out for tech companies?

Looking at the ridiculous (there I said it) over-valuations of certain group buying (and other) sites, is there evidence of a second bubble?

What would make a tech company too big too fail in an internet-dependent society that suffered a second dot com crash of sorts?

Granted, there are numerous anti-trust type lawsuits around the world, from WiFi location hoarding to monopolistic practices and everything in between which act as a kind of brake against this but is it enough?

Side note #1: I’d encourage any of you to run a failure swapshop at Bar Camp or other open format conferences you can, a wonderous exercise.

Side note #2: There is an interesting article from Linux Journal “EOF The Google Exposure” along the lines that Google as a search and advertising giant is too big too fail. I don’t agree entirely with that article as they have proven to be good at moving into many other areas (apps, android, video..) which are starting to generate returns.

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This article was written for the appointment magazine (April issue).

The effectiveness of social media platforms as a means of finding a new job remains a hot topic of debate. Of the ‘big three’, LinkedIn seems to the most obvious fit for a career search. Certainly if you’re not one of the five million UK users now harnessing the power of this business-focused social network you could be missing out on a valuable addition to your job-seeking arsenal. But how to use it effectively?

Luke Williams, specialist trainer at SocialTech, provides some top tips for growing your network, optimising your profile, some of the general do’s and don’ts for job hunting on LinkedIn and outlines some strategies for finding that new job.

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Last weekend, I went on a bit of a road trip to feed my brain.

Regular readers will know that I favour the smaller, invited-to-talk or un-conference format events (ie: Bar Camp Bournemouth) over big sales-y or pay-to-talk ones.

On the Friday NxtGenUG was a trip down memory lane, seeing old friend Jon Skeet presenting “C# goes evil with sock puppets”. I understood more than I expected (my coding is quite limited these days) but I was slightly dis-appointed with the minimal use of puppets Jon! More puppets!

Saturday was TEDxCardiff, a couple of us from Bournemouth went last year and there was a larger group in 2011.

The speakers were good, with a wide range of topics (from printing human organs, friendship, Everest climbing and more).

Highlights for me were:

Dr Kelly Page‘s talk on the effect of social networking on the value and meaning of friendship.

Kevin Chester’s talk on creativity and “Eno And”

The award for most thought provoking has to go to Mark Chataway for his talk on attitudes to vaccination. Getting the audience to act as a jury in given circumstances really stopped and made a lot of us think hard.

While you (and I) wait for the real TEDxCDF videos to be released here’s a handy set of audience shot videos of the talks by Rai M Azlan’s blog post on TEDxCardiff.

Also interesting was the invitation to all to join the organisers and speakers for some food n drinks afterwards, we did and it was really good to meet Ben Hyde who’d excellent Ignite talk I suggest you all watch:

 

Ben Hyde – Playfulness and the Art of Getting Stuff Wrong from Ignite Cardiff on Vimeo.

 

By no means a big deal but personally I wasn’t a big fan of people just reading from ipads… tech should make talks better… not just be a replacement for cue cards!

Well done to Neil and Clare for an excellent event (again).

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A nice little piece on the front of Dorset Business, talking about the survey we undertook with Liz Lean PR.

More information on the ASA CAP code and our survey findings.

As well as the social media training we offer, we also work with organisations to create or review best practice and acceptable useage policies. For more information, please call the office on 01202 79098 or drop us an email.

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